Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero Read online

  DAN ABNETT

  Triumff

  HER MAJESTY'S HERO

  KIND WORDS

  from Certain Fine Gentlemen

  "Triumff is a witch's brew of alternate history, hocus pocus, cracking action and cheesy gags. Reads like Blackadder crossed with Neal Stephenson. It's a Kind of Magick - don't miss it."

  - Stephen Baxter

  "Endlessly inventive, joyously irreverent, drenched with adrenaline and wicked humour, Dan Abnett's Triumff is a brilliant occult-comedy-historical adventure that's true to the best traditions of the genres it so eagerly devours."

  - Mike Carey

  "This is what it would be like if William Shakespeare and Rowan Atkinson got together to write a novel, after a night on the town with Terry Pratchett. This is a delightful, often original and hugely entertaining read."

  - Unbound

  "Triumff is a swashbuckling adventure in an alter-native universe, which will entertain, amuse and engage the reader. Highly recommended."

  - Civilian Reader

  "Dan Abnett is brilliant."

  - SFX

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  ANGRY ROBOT

  A member of the Osprey Group

  Lace Market House,

  54-56 High Pavement,

  Nottingham

  NG1 1HW, UK

  www.angryrobotbooks.com

  00VII

  Originally published in the UK by Angry Robot 2009

  Copyright Š 2009 by Dan Abnett

  Cover art by Larry Rostant

  Cover design by Argh! Nottingham

  ePub created by ePub Services dot Net

  All rights reserved.

  Angry Robot is a registered trademark and the Angry Robot icon a trademark of Angry Robot Ltd.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-85766-023-7

  For Nik,

  first and only

  (again)

  TRIUMFF

  Her Majesty's Hero

  *

  Being the true and AUTHENTICK account of the expl'ts

  and

  incid'nts following the RETURN to London

  of

  Sir Rupert Triumff, adventurer,

  from his CELEBRATEDVoyage of Discovery

  to the Meridional Climes.

  Never before made publick.

  *

  Given in this, my hand, this XXIIIrd day of APRILE,

  XX hundred and X Anno Domini,

  in the splendid reign of the thirtieth Gloriana.

  VIVAT REGINA!

  Wum Beaver, esq.

  EDITOR'S NOTICE.

  To the Great Variety of Readers.

  FOR THOSE READERS unfamiliar with the affairs and nature of the Anglo-Hispanic Unity, care has been taken to furnish Master Beaver's manuscript with footnotes and commentary to make all such matters comprehensible.

  However, this editor has been charged with making the following basic facts known from the outset. The AngloHispanic Unity, the longest-lasting and most powerful Empire ever to arise upon this terrestrial stage, was founded in the year Fifteen Hundred and Seventy-Five, following the marriage of Queen Elizabeth the First of England to King Philip the Second of Spain. Said union of power and lands, including as it did the virginal tracts of the New World, soon eclipsed all other nations of the globe, and has persisted since, through a worthy line of potent female monarchs, all styled "Elizabeth Gloriana".

  The other matter that helped to preserve the preeminence of the Unity was, of course, the Renaissance, which thoroughly reawakened the Sublime Lore of Magick, dormant since Antiquity. The schools and employment of the Esoteric Arte of Magick were monopolised by the Church and Church-Guilds of England, and ensured the Unity's absolute command and superiority over all the World, especially the British bits of the Unity.

  This didn't please the Spanish bits very much at all. But that's another story.

  Part of this one, in fact.

  THE PERSONS OF THIS STORY.

  SIR RUPERT TRIUMFF, gentleman adventurer and lately come discoverer of The Vast Southerly Continent

  AGNEW, his man

  LORD CALLUM GULL, Laird of Ben Phie, Captain of the Royal Guard

  CARDINAL THOMAS WOOLLY, first minister of Her Majesty's United Church

  SIR JOHN HOCKRAKE, Duke of Salisbury, a scoundrel

  ROUSTAM ALLASANDRO DE LA VEGA, Regent of Castile, Governor of Toledo, and victor of Lille

  ROBERT SLEE, of the Queen's Privy Council

  THE DIVINE ALEISTER JASPERS, a junior officer of the United Church

  UPTIL, a noble autochthon from foreign climes

  DOLL TARESHEET, a notable actress of the Wooden Oh and these parts

  NEVILLE DE QUINCEY, a police surgeon and examiner

  MOTHER GRUNDY, of the countryside

  GIUSEPPE GIUSEPPO, an Italian gentleman of ingenuity

  TANTAMOUNT O'BOW, a villain

  CATHEAD

  & in addition ~

  Divers servants, ladies and lords, as well as some personages I might have forgotten in this compilation, along with copious hautboys and tapers, and fanfares on all entrances and exits.

  The setting is the present day.

  Staged in the modern style.

  Vivat Regina!

  THE FIRST CHAPTER.

  Which is set upon St Dunstan's Day.

  It had rained, furiously, for all of the six days leading up to St Dunstan's Day.

  Water rattled off slopes of broken slates, streamed like horse-piss from split gutters, cascaded from the points of eaves, boiled like oxtail soup in leaf-choked drains, coursed in foamy breakers across flagged walks, and thumped down drainpipes in biblical quantities. For the same measure of time that it had taken the Good Lord God to manufacture Everything In Creation, the entire city was comprehensively rinsed. There was water, as the Poet had it (the Poet, admittedly, was wont to have it mixed with brandy), everywhere, and every drop of it was obeying Newton's First Law of Apples.

  In the rents of Beehive Lane, near Boddy's Bridge, unpotted chimneys guzzled in the rain and doused more than a score of ailing grates. The steep cobbled rise of Garlick Hill became a new tributary to the Thames, and the run-off that washed down it from the foundations of the spice importers' hilltop barns had loose cloves floating in it and tasted like consomme. At Leadenhalle, the rapping of the rain upon the metal roof drove several market traders temporarily psychotic, and deprived many more of their usual cheery dispositions, and so the cheap was suspended until the inclement weather subsided ("if sodden London don't subside first" remarked more than one tired and emotional stall-holder). Many worried that, if the fantastically grim weather persisted, the Great Masque that coming Saturday might itself have to be abandoned. And that didn't bear thinking about.

  The Fleet, the Tyburn and the Westbourne all spilled beyond their courses, and enjoyed wild excursions through the streets of the
ditch-quarters and the wharfs. More refuse was then moved by force of flood than is in a month by the municipal collectors, though, to be fair, the Noble Guild of Refuse and Shite Handlers had been on a go-slow since 1734, following a dispute over the scale of Yuletide gratuities.

  The city's watergates were all choked to drowning point, each gagging like an over-eager sot on an upturned bottle of musket. Conduits thundered with the passing pressure, their stonework trembling, and voided themselves with huge tumult into the Thames, casting up mists of rainbow spray from their cataracts. Men from the Guild of Cisterns and Ducts visited each city conduit daily in turn and stood, dour and drenched by the spray, shaking their heads and tutting.

  The Cockpit on Birdcage Walk became so full that the stewards had to open all the public doors to vent the water before gladiation could begin that night. Small boys had been found sailing rival armadas of paper man-o-wars from the pit rails. Even after the stewards' action, some said the only birds worth betting on that night were ducks. When it did eventually occur, the cockfight proved to be a notable and famous bout, featuring a title fight for the Bantam Weight Champion of All London. The contenders were Cocky Joe, a six-pound, experienced fighter trained by John Lyon of Poplar, and Bigge Ben, a twelve-pound newcomer presented by one Thomas Arnes of Peckham. The eventual victor, Bigge Ben, was later disqualified when it was discovered he was a cunningly disguised buzzard, and Cocky Joe reinstated, though by this time he was full of onion and three-quarters roasted.

  The rain fell on all. It made no distinctions for rank, and offered no exceptions for situation. It hammered on the unprotected heads of the impoverished and loose of bowel in the jakes of Shite-berne. It drizzled off the leaded glass of the Palace Mews. It fell with a continuance and persistence that was nothing short of impertinent.

  From Cornhill to Ludgate, not one thing in the whole Vale of the Thames prospered, except perhaps the osiers and watercress in the marshes.

  When one of the wags in the Rouncey Mare off Allhallows Walk remarked upon the fact that there was no superstition associated with so many days of rain before St Dunstan's Eve, it was volubly decided that there bloody well ought to be, and bloody well would be before the tavern closed, so long as liquor sufficiently inspired the collective imagination. Indeed, sometime after ten that night, a handsome and appropriate saying was devised by a drover of advanced years named Boy Simon, but sadly it had been forgotten by the time daylight crept in and announced the dawn of St Dunstan's Day.

  The towers and steeples of a hundred and nine churches shivered at the dismal morning and driving rain, and bells slapped out the hour of daybreak as if the water had softened their clappers. Most of the City's population grimaced in their states of sleep and rolled over. Those up and active through the necessity of their various offices shuddered grimly and went about their business in hats and hoods and long, soggy capes. A carter, late delivering for a fishmonger in Billingsgate, overturned on the corner of Windmill Street, and his entire cargo swam off through the neighbouring byways. Shortly afterwards, a magistrate in Rudlin Circus was painfully thrown when his horse was bitten by a passing turbot. The fishmonger was sanguine, however, as sales of fish had fallen dramatically in the course of the week.

  One of the hundred and nine churches tolling out that lubricated morning was St Dunstan's Undershaft, near the New Gate, where the aforementioned saint's day was about to be celebrated. Dunstan, a ninth century Norfolk lacemaker, died piously during the notorious Woolcarder's Revolt of 814, and was canonised in 1853 during the Diet of Cannes. He is the Patron Saint of boundaries and hedges, lacemakers, undergarments and impalement, though not necessarily in that order.

  In the damp shade of St Dunstan's porch, valiant observers of the martyr's festival (the eleventh day of May) made garlands of flowers and ribbons, and glumly offered small lace keepsakes showing the saint "being martyred on the sharpened fence" for sale to empty streets. The deluge had kept almost everyone away. Large sections of the regular congregation had found drier things to do, and a promised coach party of pilgrims from the provinces, composed in the main of folk from the popular Christian sects the Orford Doxies and the Exeter Terrestrials, had not materialised.

  Even the priestesses in the Temple of the Justified Madonna across the road from St Dunstan's had decided for once to wear clothes. They stood, red-nosed and corset-clad, in the windows of the seminary, and occasionally waved encouragement to the St Dunstan's band across the street. Needless to say, the folk of St Dunstan's didn't wave back.

  Two streets behind St Dunstan's, an alley too insignificant to have a name of its own led through the rents to Chitty Yard. It was raining there, too.

  The yard was a paved square, forty feet across, flanked on one side by the dingy rears of the rents. To the other three it was enclosed by the back of the once-imposing Chitty House. A small fountain, in the shape of a dismayed griffon, stood at the centre and had been dry for seventy-three years. It was full now, of leaves and rainwater.

  The Chittys had come into money late in the previous century, thanks to a small miniver business that had flourished at a time when cuffs and collars were worn hirsute. They had built Chitty House as a headquarters and town residence, and occupied it continuously until the last Chitty had died of fur on the lung twenty years previously. Since then, the building had been a tannery, a hostel for drovers, a bordello (twice), a store for timber, an eating house, and a singularly unsuccessful farrier's (one Joseph Pattersedge, who suffered from chronic hippophobia). Now it was empty, with its rafters open to the weather, and its environs were of interest only to vermin, weary beggars or those in need of privacy.

  At dawn on St Dunstan's day, four of the latter were assembled in the hidden yard. One was a diminutive, portly Spaniard from Valladolid, who huddled from the rain under the stoop of the storehouse wing, his ruff and waxed moustache as limp as his expression. He clutched a velvet cape and a plumed hat that did not belong to him. Opposite him, across the yard, stood a rake-thin man of Suffolk descent, an imposing figure over six feet tall, dressed in a simple suit as grim as his countenance. He too held clothes that were not his. Every few seconds, he winced slightly.

  The other two individuals in the yard were trying to kill each other.

  Lord Callum Gull, Laird of Ben Phie, Captain of the Royal Guard, Scottish to the marrow ("and loyal to the courgette" as the old saying goes), edged around the yard with four feet of basket-hilted steel swinging from his hand. His red hair was plastered to his skull, his linen shirt was sticking to his rangy form, and his breath was rasping through defiantly clenched teeth. He knew well his Livy, his Caesar, his De Studio Militari and his Vegetius. He knew extremely well the finer points of The Art of War, particularly the one on the end of his rapier.

  Sir Rupert Triumff, seafarer, Constable of the Gravesend Basin and celebrated discoverer of Australia, was commanding over a yard of sharpened metal of his own. His black locks hung in ringlets around his brow, his shirt had acquired two extra slits since he had put it on that morning, and he was humming a song about the Guinea Coast for no real reason at all. Triumff had once read the title page of Vegetius, owned a risible translation of Livy, and often quoted Caesar, even though he had never been within ten feet of a copy. He was not, at that stage, entirely sure what day it was.